Our Saint used to say that to equivocate was, in his opinion, to canonize lying, and that simplicity was, after all, the best kind of shrewdness. The children of darkness, he said, use cunning and artifice in their dealings with one another, but the children of God should take for their motto the words: He that walketh sincerely walketh confidently. Duplicity, simulation, insincerity always betray a low mind. If, in the language of the wise man, _the lips that lie kill the soul_, what can be the effect of the conversation of one who habitually speaks with a _double heart_?[1] [Footnote 1: Psalm xii. 3.] UPON SOLITUDE. Some one was praising country life, and calling it holy and innocent. Blessed Francis replied that country life has drawbacks just as city life has, and that as there is both good and bad company, so there is also good and bad solitude. Good, when God calls us into it, as He says by a prophet, _I will lead her into the wilderness and I will speak to her heart_.[1] Bad, when it is of that kind of which it is written, _Woe to him that is alone_.[2] As regards holiness and innocence, he said that country folk were certainly far from being, as a matter of course, endowed with these good qualities. As for temptations and occasions of sin, he said: "There are evil spirits who go to and fro in desert places quite as much as in cities; if grace does not hold us up everywhere, everywhere we may stumble. Lot, who in the most wicked of all cities was holy and just, when in solitude fell into the most dreadful of sins. Men carry themselves about with them and find themselves everywhere, and frailty can no more be got rid of by them than can the shadow by the body that casts it. "Many deceive themselves greatly and become their own seducers by imagining that they possess those virtues, the sins contrary to which they do not commit. The absence of a vice and the possession of its contrary virtue are very different things. "To be without folly is, indeed, to have the beginning of wisdom, but it is a beginning so feeble as by itself scarcely to deserve the name of wisdom. "Abstaining from evil is a very different thing from doing good, although this abstaining is of itself a species of good: it is like the plan of a building compared with the building itself. Virtue does not consist so much in habit as in action. Habit is in itself an indolent sort of quality, which, indeed, inclines us to do good, but does no more, unless inclination be followed by action. "How shall he who has no one in command set over him learn obedience? He who is never contradicted, patience? He who has no superior, humility? And how shall he who, like a misanthrope, flies from intercourse with other men, notwithstanding that he is obliged to love them as himself, how shall he, I say, learn brotherly love?